Bloomberg's Surveillance State

Mike Bloomberg Is Watching You. Get Used To It.

In the era of sleeper cells and domestic agents that we are being told that we live in, our leaders are demanding vast and novel powers as part of their effort to “keep us safe.” Given the centrality of New York City to anti-terrorist efforts in the United States, one wonders whether Bloomberg’s weary, resigned tone had less to do with a policy he wishes to implement, and more to do with one that will be implanted whether even he “likes it or not.”

Whoever is pilling these strings, however, or fiddling with these control panels, Mayor Bloomberg’s public statement remains of failure of office. In introducing the establishment of a vast public surveillance network in New York City as a fait accompli, the Mayor has chosen to sidestep the democratic process and assume the role of an Ottoman sultan, or at least a messenger from some royal court.

Bloomberg’s Choice

The abolition of the concept of public privacy is a essentially a moral assertion. It is to state that traditional norms and expectations are insufficient, or outmoded, or are outweighed by greater concerns regarding our safety and well-being. This is not, on its face, entirely untenable. A case could be made. History is full of peoples who gave up all manner of freedoms for security, protection or the perception of increased public order. But if we are to become one of them, then the debate should at least be held. In the city that was considered the capital of democracy during the Cold War era, it seems jarringly imperial to simply be informed of the new order via FM radio, with no choice offered but to “get used to it.”

This is Michael Bloomberg’s way of doing things. When it concerned pettier things, like enormous sodas, it seemed kind of humorous. But it wasn’t — not to the Mayor, anyway. For Bloomberg, the unavailability of Big Gulps, the decorous concealing of cigarettes, and the scanning and recording of your face as you walk down St. Mark’s Place are all parts of a whole; all of these things are components of a better, safer, future in which we will stop — will be prevented from — doing all those troublesome things we keep doing.

It could be argued that Bloomberg-era New York represents the swinging of a historical pendulum. New York was once an anarchic place, a wild city. Now it’s a city where you can buy a lot of different varieties of organic sesame oil. It is perhaps natural that periods of perceived decline are followed by periods in which strong rulers make the case for security over wildness, and for surveillance over secrecy: every commuter is happy when the trains run on time.

But aren’t strong rulers, along with their sometimes petty, sometimes frightening rules, merely another symptom of decline, rather than its remedy?

By placing the establishment of a surveillance state in New York City outside of the realm of public discussion, Mayor Bloomberg is signaling that certain things — things like the accountability of democratic leaders, or our ability to discuss the nature of our public realm — have declined very far indeed.